


Julia's Story

by cardassianfamilyvalues



Category: 1984 - George Orwell
Genre: Character Study, Dystopia, F/M, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Implied/Referenced Sexual Harassment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 07:21:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20254333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cardassianfamilyvalues/pseuds/cardassianfamilyvalues
Summary: What attracts a woman like Julia to a man like Winston Smith, anyway?





	Julia's Story

She’s tired of sleeping with old men. She dreams of handsome young men, well-built, tanned and muscular, who will laugh and smile and giggle with her. Sometimes she even finds herself hungering for the insipid photos spat out by the Pornosec machine, even though she knows the pictures are all fake. After all, who would pose for them? It would be unthinkable to allow proles to do it—that would risk them finding out far too much about the processes of the Ministry of Truth. And it would be just as unthinkable to use the actual face of a Party member in such filthy pictures. Sometimes she smirks at the hypocrisy of it; no pictures of Party members in the act, oh no, as if they never had affairs themselves, corrupt lying hypocrites. She remembers one of the Inner Party officials brow-beating one of the girls from Pornosec into posing for dirty pictures for him. Both of them were disappeared. Julia is sure the illicit photographs were destroyed, as they always were, but sometimes she imagines the dirty old bastard snuck her pictures into one of the kaleidoscope machines, or if perhaps just bits of her, an eye or a leg or a breast, ended up in one of the composite photographs.

Old men! These decrepit dirty old men, full of despair, desperately grasping at her body as though trying to draw her youth from her. Sometimes she idly wonders whether if she presses down too hard one of them during sex, sawdust will leak out of their bodies, like the sawdust that coated her when she volunteered at the saw mills as a girl, to help the bloody war movement, and the volunteer leader used to always find an excuse to lean over close to correct her, covering her hands with his old liver-spotted ones, suffusing her with the smell of stale coffee and stale cigarettes and stale bile.

But the men her age can’t be trusted. They wallow in the Party’s bullshit like pigs in slop. They are brainwashed from head to toe (not to mention penis). In their own way they are just as vigilant as the women of the Junior Anti-Sex League for any hints of sexcrime in females. And at least the Junior Anti-Sex League are willing to deny their _own_ pleasure. It is the female orgasm the Party is to abolish, not the male. No, young men would not make better lovers—to the older generation a woman’s orgasm might be irrelevant, but to the younger it is simply unthinkable. If young men can think of it at all, they regard it as monstrous and disgusting, like a venereal disease. She guesses there must be young people like her, but it isn’t worth the risk—better to stick with the older Party members, who have at least some vague recollection of the time beyond. Julia instinctively trusts those obsessed with the past, despite her own almost total disinterest in it. In fact she sees nostalgia as a form of corruption, like sexual desire is, and it is in corruption that she is safe. She longs to be submerged deep down in the muck.

No, Julia avoids the young men of her generation, for she suspects they don’t actually have real flesh or blood or sperm—inside they are just gleaming metal and thick truncheons and cold gleaming linoleum. So she remains with the old men, who are filled with poisonous memories and morbid obsessions and filthy lumps of old sawdust, corrupt to the core.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sort of fix-it fic I wrote a while ago when I was rereading the novel and trying to get my head around what, exactly, attracted Julia to Winston. Frankly I think 1984 is a misogynistic text in a lot of ways and it's easy to see Julia as just a fulfillment of a male fantasy; this is my attempt to give her some interiority and explain her affair with Winston in a way that has more to do with her own ideas and fantasies than Winston's (and the whole point of the novel is they never really connect, after all.)


End file.
